April 24, 2012

BOOKS: Eminent Outlaws, Christopher Bram (2012)

Here we have a fine overview of gay
American literature. To be precise; it's about gay male literature; Bram
acknowledges that his focus is specifically on male authors, both because he
wanted to narrow the focus, and because he feels less familiar with lesbian
literature, which "needs its own historian." As Bram also acknowledges, this is
by no means a complete history of gay literature; he focuses on the authors who
played the largest roles in the cultural history.Unlike some books of this kind, Bram's survey does not focus only on
novelists. And how could it? You can't tell the story of gay literature in
America without including the playwrights -- Williams, Albee, Crowley, Kushner
-- or the poets -- Ginsberg, O'Hara, Merrill, Doty.But of course, we get the novelists as well. The opening chapters focus on
writers like Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, and James Baldwin, who were
writing before there was such a thing as gay literature.Bram's story progresses through the beginnings of the gay rights movement to
1978, which he calls "the annus mirabilis of gay fiction," when four major
novels were published: Edmund White's Nocturnes for the King of Naples,
Larry Kramer's Faggots, Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the
Dance, and Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City.(And my god, how wonderful it is to read someone who takes Maupin seriously
as a writer instead of dismissing him as a mere purveyor of fluff. Bram gives
Maupin the full credit he deserves for the depth of his characterizations, his
nimble plotting, and his gift for dialogue. And he makes a strong enough case
for The Night Listener as Maupin's best work that I'm tempted to go
back and read it again.)Bram tracks the effects of AIDS on gay literature in the 80s, and the way
that the field changed after the mid-90s, as the disease became more manageable
as a chronic condition and less of a death sentence.And through it all, there's Gore Vidal, whose 1948 The City and the
Pillar was among the first American novels about gay people, and who
continues to be a significant essayist to this day. He would never accept being
identified as a gay author, of course, having always insisted that "there are no
homosexual people, only homosexual acts."Bram is clear in his introduction that he is not attempting to create a canon
of essential works or authors. But if you were looking for such a canon, you
could do worse than to focus on the works and authors highlighted in Eminent
Outlaws. It's a lively history of gay literature, and how it has both
changed and been changed by the culture around it.